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I recently completed an unsanctioned,unsupervised psychological experiment on my children, (Laughter) the premise of which was$10,000 in cash on the kitchen table and a sign next to itthat said 'Don't touch the money yet!', and before I dive into it, you should know that weare a game-playing family. We play ball games, board games,dice games, card games, all sorts of games, but the games that my children loveto play most are games like Monopoly, and when they play Monopoly,they play marathon games of Monopoly that last hours and hoursover days of play. Each of my kids has a unique strategyand personality when they play Monopoly. My daughter, who is 11,she is always the dog. She plays entirely for Chanceand Community Chest cards; (Laughter) you can say that she usesthe 'luck' strategy. My 9-year-old son is always the car -a very strategic player. He buys all of the Railroadsand all of the Utilities and then proceeds to put houses and hotelson the most expensive properties - very savvy. And then his younger brother,who is seven, he buys everything that he lands onwith no exception, which is fitting because heis the wheelbarrow. Now, before I tell youhow my experiment unfolded, I have to share an observationthat led me to the creation of it. One Monopoly marathon, Saturday morning,I was playing with my kids and noticed that they were all playingjust outside of the rules of the game. So they were doing thingslike buying each other out of jail and lending each other moneyto buy properties, and I found myself going, 'Guys,this is not how this game is played!' to which they'd say, 'Dad, it's fine!We just want her on the board with us', or, 'He can pay me backat the end of the game, when he's flush with cash', and I'm thinking again,'What am I teaching these kids?' So, I started watchinghow they were playing - listening to their banter, getting a feelfor how they were making decisions - and I had this thought: 'What if they're playing this waybecause the money isn't real?' It's a concept I've been reading a lotabout, lately, 'Financial abstraction', the notion that when moneybecomes more and more of an idea, less tangible and therefore more abstract, it changes the way we interact with iton a regular basis, and there's anecdotal evidenceof abstraction everywhere around us. All you have to do is listen carefullyto people who say, 'I loaned my childor grandchild the phone, and a month later, all these errant in-app chargesshowed up on my bill.' In 2014, Apple reimbursed customersfor in-app purchases that were unapproved, mostly by children,to the tune of $32.5 million. This is in a US FTC settlement. In the documentation, it said it was just too easy for kidsto make an in-app purchase. The Imagineers at Disney were chargedwith making the parks 'frictionless' - is what they called it - so they invested a billion dollarsin a MagicBand. It's a wearable device that functionsas your room key, your park ticket, and your ID and walletwhen you're on park property. So if your child wants a set of earsand a dessert in the Magic Kingdom, 'bibbidi-bobbidi-boo' - (Laughter) your vacation just cost a whole lot more, magically. Magically. Lastly, I had a conversationwith some teenagers who told me that $100,000 a yearreally wasn't that much money. I said, 'Really?Why do you think that?' They said, 'Well, we both have $500,000in our ATM machines on Grand Theft Auto', (Laughter) which is a very popularand somewhat sketchy video game. So as I'm playing with my kidsand I'm watching them play, listening to them talk, I thought, 'What if the moneywere real on the table? Would they play differently?' And so I calculated quickly on the box, 'How much would it takein capital, in currency, to play a physical gameof Monopoly with my kids so that they actually tangiblygot to feel the money in their hands?' And I estimated, for four or five players,it's about $10,000. So one Friday, I stopped at the bank, I got all the denominations of billson a Monopoly board with the exceptionof a $500 bill - hard to get - and on Sunday, I rounded the family upfor a high-stakes game of Monopoly, (Laughter) where the winner takes all. All of $20, by the way. All of $20. You have never seen kids' eyeslight up the way mine did when I handed each of them$1,500 in starter capital, and you have never seenanyone's eyes light up like my wife's when I took it back on Monday. (Laughter) All of it. Our marathon gameonly lasted two and a half hours - far shorter and more strategicthan most of the games they normally play. True to my hypothesis, two of my three kidsactually played differently; my daughter still played the 'luck' card. She was the first one bankrupted, (Laughter) and she happily retiredto the living room to read a book. My youngest son, the wheelbarrow,did not buy everything he landed on; instead, he carefully calculated how many rolls away he wasfrom one of his brother's properties and how much he would owe his brotherif he landed on said property, and made his decisions based on that. In effect, having real money on the tableand a cash prize at the end made him more conservative. And my middle son - very strategic - still bought all of the Railroads,still bought all of the Utilities, but did not buy Boardwalk and Park Placeor Mayfair and Park Lane, but instead, he put hotels immediatelyon Oriental and Baltic Avenue, or Coventry and Leicester Squareon the UK version. When I asked him why,in his own words, he said, 'Dad, they're justmore affordable properties.' (Laughter) At which point, I cried a tear of pride. (Laughter) So he got it! In the end, my son finishedwith 28 properties, more cash than he'd ever seenand held in his entire life, and he now knows the meaningof the phrase 'making it rain'. (Laughter) Look how happy he is, (Laughter) and how annoyedhis brother and sister are. In the confines of my experiment,there is an idea worth spreading, and it is this: I believe kids today are being raised in a worldwhere money is no longer real; it's actually an illusion,but it has very real consequences. Peter Drucker, famed leadership guru, said banking and finance industries today are less about moneyand more about information, and yet young people todaydon't get that information; they don't get the experiencesof money, early on. Three researchers fromthe Centre for Creative Leadership, in a study done two decades agothat's been replicated many, many times, they interviewed over 200 executives in a report called'Key events in executives' lives'. In this report, they found that of the 200 top-level executiveswho were the top of their game, all of them had similar characteristics. One of them wasthat early on in their career, they had been thrustinto a leadership role that required them to make decisionsthat had serious consequences. They also had a mentor in placethat helped them appreciate the lessons they were supposed to learnfrom those experiences. The study created a leadership frameworkthat said, in essence, that someone with potential, if given the opportunity to engagein strategically relevant experiences and given the ability to learn the lessonsfrom those experiences, would have a higher likelihood of successin their career in a leadership capacity. Now if you took that study frameworkand my $10,000 experiment and looked at itthrough the kaleidoscope, you would get a statement like this: if kids are given financially-relevantexperiences in their life and someone is there to help themlearn the lessons from those experiences, they have a higher likelihood of achieving financialsuccess later in life, and in my humble opinion, they need to have them early,and they need to have them often. We under this not-so-subtle societal shiftin the way that we pay each other, today. https://newent.amebaownd.com/posts/22975251. It's estimated there are trillionsof dollars circling the globe in our global economy every single day, yet only four percent of that moneyis actually in coin or currency. The rest is all digital, data packets,ones and zeroes, and today's digital-native youth - they don't see people payingwith cash or cheques. In fact, if ever you're in a line, and someone in frontpulls out their chequebook to pay, you are liable to say to yourself,'Really, a chequebook? This is going to take forever.' You're laughing because it's true. The currency of today is digital. Many of these kids equate spendingwith credit and debit cards, with Google Wallet and Paypal and Zap. All of these are what theyequate spending to, and by the way, I am not pooh-poohingthe technological advancements in payment technology today - far from it. I think tokenisation and randomisationand biometrics are the wave of the future. The first tim

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